


Ritual Purposes

by bottlecapmermaid



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Fantasized Violence, Fuck Or Die, I suppose, M/M, Ritual Artifacts, That's Not How The Force Works, excessive references to Kylo as a wizard, weird cultist kylo ren
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-11 04:11:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15964427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bottlecapmermaid/pseuds/bottlecapmermaid
Summary: Armitage Hux would rather die than sleep with Kylo Ren.He gets to prove it.





	Ritual Purposes

**Author's Note:**

> this started as a shitpost and then kept happening, just take it and let me be a free man
> 
> talk to me about kylux and tropes and Ritual Artifacts over on tumblr at thefearofcod.tumblr.com

“Don’t touch it,” Ren had said of the ugly, useless artifact, and then fucking left it on Hux’s table, in Hux’s quarters, in Hux’s way. Ren may be the Supreme Leader, may be the son of literal royalty, of vaunted war heroes, but he still has never had a single manner. Even Hux, raised by droids on a series of decaying Star Destroyers, knows better than to leave his possessions in the rooms of others. Particularly things he considers valuable. Just because he doesn’t have any immediate understanding of, or use for, the thing doesn’t mean he couldn’t steal it to hold over Ren’s head for the tiniest measure of control, or to see if he might figure out how to use it to his own advantage.

Still, he hadn’t touched it. After the humiliating events on Crait, Ren had retreated to his rooms to sulk and cry and trash things, or whatever it is he does in the comforting isolation of his own space, while Hux, a competent adult and military leader, cleaned up all his fucking messes and spaced Snoke’s corpse with somewhat less dignity and ceremony than irredeemably spoiled rations. A standard week later, Ren emerged from his lair raging and screaming and demanding a total change of course and objectives, abandonment of the repair efforts and salvaging of the Supremacy, and the beginning of another of his ludicrous scavenger hunts. Although, Hux supposed in the dubious privacy of his own mind, they had rather abandoned their hunt for the scavenger. Nonetheless, he directed the fleet, headed as ever by his Finalizer, toward a corner of the galaxy so remote that Hux did wonder what could be of such powerful interest to Ren there, past the middle of nowhere. He half suspected the whole ride might be a show of command solely for Ren’s amusement, a shove at the boundaries of his new authority.

Serving Supreme Leader Ren was rather different from serving Supreme Leader Snoke, with Hux stewing over it for the full journey. Under Snoke, his duties were to command military might, to manage resources, and to carry out the mechanical details in Snoke’s grand vision for the First Order, all things for which he has trained himself from childhood. Under Ren, he had somehow become an interpreter, a go-between for a vengeful, overgrown wizard child and his own damn organization. Ren never learned to speak in terms of proper military strategy; Hux will never live down the shame of Ren’s crazed shouting in front of their crew on Crait, being seen to share his power with a man spitting with fury. _Blow that piece of junk out of the sky,_ indeed. And of course Hux’s soldiers, good and highly trained people, professionals, from the last ranks of Troopers right up to Hux’s own aides, have not received instruction in parsing the conflicting demands of some fanatical mystic.

When questioned about the nature of his urgent errand, Ren merely mumbled something about an artifact of great power to aid his path ever deeper into the Dark. To Hux’s surprise, Ren’s one-man trip to the surface of the unpronounceable planet’s surface took barely two standard days, and upon his return to the Finalizer he was so preoccupied with his new acquisition that he hummed in dismissive approval when Hux suggested returning to the wrecked Supremacy.

And then after spending several days in close communication with an individual who was, as far as Hux cared to tell, a representative of a planet of genderless historians, Ren left his fucking magic rock in the middle of Hux’s life, and here’s Hux, stuck working around it. He isn’t afraid of Ren’s sorcerer’s tricks or his magic sword, despite having been threatened with both in the past. The worst thing Ren could do to him is--what? Turn him into a vegetable? Erase his whole mind? Hux isn’t particularly afraid of death, only cares inasmuch as it would be inconvenient for his ambitions. He’s too polite to go about touching other people’s things.

He organizes things around the stupid artifact, frowning at it and worrying about having to shoo Millicent away from it--presumably if he’s not to touch it, neither is she--but she seems as perturbed as Hux. Sometimes he catches her perched on his desk, growling at the object from the other side of the room. He can’t help but agree with her. The thing makes him uneasy; even outside of its supposed mystical qualities, he has no idea what its practical function might be, and Hux dislikes mysteries. Perhaps it could be a crude weapon, he thinks, scowling at it one evening. Ren has left the damn thing in his quarters for days without any sign of retrieving it. Perhaps he’s forgotten it altogether, caught up in whatever new shiny fancy he’s entertaining now. Fucking typical Ren, leaving his shit all over Hux’s ships like a bored toddler.

It’s ugly, hewn black stone, crudely carved and almost too long to be oblong, with some kind of lesser designs chiseled across the surface. Time and wear of some manner have rubbed the surface smooth and then roughened it again, some of the designs blurring out as if viewed under water. Getting too close to it turns Hux’s stomach in ways he doesn’t like, as if the thing itself wants him to stay away. Fine enough, he needn’t investigate what isn’t his.

He can’t shake the feeling that the artifact is somehow tracking or observing him. Hux is well aware that he tends toward paranoia, though he justifies it to himself as reasonable caution; when one lives on a giant spaceship and regularly has dealings with psychic wizards, no level of precaution is unreasonable. Simply because Hux can’t prove Ren is waging some kind of bizarre psychological warfare against him does not mean it mightn’t still be the case. Even in the comfort of his most natural place, the bridge of his ship, Hux senses that he is being watched and catalogued but not in the way he imagines Ren’s intrusion into one’s mind would feel. Late one night, face turned away from the wall separating him from the artifact, he realizes it might a Force amplifier of some arcane sort. He turns Ren’s phrasing over in his mind, “an artifact of great power to aid his path into the Dark.” Ren hasn’t made any displays of his powers more grandiose than usual since picking it up. Perhaps it doesn’t work, or Ren can’t figure out how to use it.

The last straw is when Hux wants to take tea with one of his commanders to discuss allocation of the resources from the Supremacy and has to set his fucking tea service on the desk. He makes it through the meeting, sees his visitor out the door, and heads directly for Ren’s quarters. Of course Ren does not open the door for either Hux’s repeated buzzes or his eventual hammering, so he manually overrides the locks, pleased that Ren hasn’t seen to something so pedestrian and below him.

Ren’s quarters aren’t as completely ruined as Hux might have expected, though the regulation furnishings have been shoved around and left at odd angles. A voice floats from deeper inside, higher than Ren’s, at first speaking a mellifluous language Hux can’t place before switching to accentless Basic.

“--has no direct translation in Basic; this term is more nuanced than Basic typically allows. However, in this particular context, galactic location, and chronological placement, one may render it as _‘an overwhelming conviction for oneself’_ or _‘intense euphoria or suffering’_ although this is the word traditionally left as _‘passion.’_ Over time the word passion has taken on its own social and religious connotations in Basic, so translations insisting upon that rendering may be rather suspect. It is also occasionally used euphemistically--”

Is Ren taking extraordinarily dull linguistic history lessons in his spare time? The door to the room is open, so Hux marches in as if he owns the place. Technically he does, because Ren is a failed ascetic with no financial skills.

Three screens at a disaster zone of a desk show swaths of indecipherable carved text and ancient artifacts vaguely similar to the one obstructing Hux’s days, a small hologram of a standing humanoid bathing the otherwise dark room in blue light. Pages of old-fashioned paper litter the desk, and Ren is hunched over one, clutching a pen, apparently totally focused on the hologram.

“It appears you’ve a visitor, Supreme Leader. It was not conveyed to me that we might be interrupted. I trust you will contact me at a more convenient time.” The hologram snaps off.

Ren turns to Hux with a snarl, faintly ridiculous in the bleak illumination of the screens and the debris of his scribbled homework, scowling through his hair. “Hux! What are you--you can’t interrupt them! They were about to _explain!”_

“With all due respect, Supreme Leader, you also have some explaining to do,” Hux snaps. Damn getting choked or thrown about again, Hux is at the end of his carefully apportioned patience and Ren wastes it the way he wastes every other resource. “What is that thing, and when do you intend you retrieve it?”

“You wouldn’t--understand. It’s a ritual object, imbued with power from--”

“You don’t know, that’s why you had to consult some living information repository; you wanted something and you don’t even know what it _does.”_

“I do know what it does! It magnifies my abilities, and before you interrupted us I nearly had a full answer.” Ren’s pouting now, eyes wide and lips twisted. Hux wants to split them with his fist or his boot.

“Then why, if I may, is it in my room?” Trust Ren to need an instruction manual for his magical rock. Hux does not believe Ren understands the object, and personally suspects it to be quite useless. He couldn’t even use it for a paperweight; he doesn’t have papers to weigh down. Perhaps he could bludgeon Ren with it. There would be a kind of power.

“It is--it speaks to me. In my mind, through the Force. Not with words, but with… impulses. When it’s nearby I feel something like static in a corrupted frequency, but angry or curious or hungry. I can’t sleep near it. You’re as sensitive to the Force as a dead thing, though, so it can’t bother you. Keeping it away from me is the only way I can think, and you aren’t foolish enough to touch it even without a warning.” The usual fevered brightness is back in Ren’s eyes, and he glances back at the monitors, ready to ignore Hux.

“It does bother me! I feel it watching me, or is that you spying on me as usual and it’s just magnified that, as you say?” His skin crawls at the idea of Ren’s psychic reach expanding such that even Hux himself can feel it. What else might Ren do with is power turned up like this? Could he direct things outside of this ship with his mind? Puncture the hull or shields of an enemy ship with loose debris? Crush Hux from kilometers away with an errant thought? He doubts even Ren knows.

“You…” Ren tilts his head the way Millicent does when she’s listening for something Hux can’t hear. “You can feel it?”

“I don’t know, can I? If I’m as insensitive as you so _insensitively say,_ then I oughtn’t have any basis for comparison. Take it out of my life in three days or I’ll space it.” Bound and determined to be rid of the fucking thing, his business as concluded as any ever is with Ren, Hux turns on his heel and is out of Ren’s spartan but weirdly claustrophobic rooms exactly as quickly as he entered them. Any undue haste might suggest that he fears Ren, which is not the case, though he may at times dread Ren’s capacity for wild inconvenience.

\--

Three days later, Ren has not retrieved his ritual rock. It isn’t even shiny; Hux can’t justify keeping it in an under-evolved magpie way. Always a man of his word despite what others may say, Hux stands in the middle of his personal office at parade rest and stares the offending thing down. Fuck Ren and his wild inconveniences to Hux; he’ll inconvenience Ren right back and damn the consequences. If he dies he’ll haunt Ren, ruin his life, make certain Ren knows precisely where he went wrong: crossing Hux.

The nearest airlock isn’t far off. He considered tossing the thing into an incinerator or down a garbage chute like any other annoyance of which he cares to be rid, but he did promise Ren that he would space it himself. It will be satisfying in a way that tossing it in the trash wouldn’t.

The fucking rock stares back at him out of its numerous ugly carvings. At certain angles, they almost look like crude renderings of human eyes. He resists the urge to make an obscene gesture.

Fighting the creeping discomfort the thing exudes, he approaches its seat on his table. It’s been there nearly a month, but it doesn’t even have the good grace to be dusty. Eventually everything Hux owns comes into contact with cat hair, no matter how scrupulously and quickly he cleans or instructs the maintenance droids, with the clear exception of this object. Just as well, really, he doesn’t want it coming into contact with anything that was once attached to Millie.

To his credit, his hand does not tremble as he reaches out to grasp the thing. It looks thick enough that his fingers won’t meet around it; he hopes it’s not so heavy he’ll have to carry it with two hands. Of course he has gloves, but for once he wonders if the magic could seep through them and into his skin. He strips off his gloves, slaps them down on his desk, and keeps scowling at it. Best to face the thing head-on; at this point, gloves would be akin to hiding, admitting he thinks it could hurt him.

Hux hates the thing, hates Ren, hates the mad lengths to which one single Force cultist drives him. If only Ren had truly wiped them all out, and then finished with himself. Perhaps Hux really will cave his skull in with the object.

As he reaches for the stone, his skin prickles with something akin to radioactivity, a feeling he’s had off Ren’s magic on occasion; the first few times he had medical check him for actual radiation. They didn’t find any. He worries about cancers and burns on his soul, though he knows it doesn’t matter or exist.

Two things happen at the same time: Hux’s fingertips approach the surface of the object, and Kylo Ren rips the door open with magic-assisted strength and launches himself across the room, likely also with magic, because he is incapable of doing anything purely under his own power; Hux ignores the more disturbing possibility that Kylo’s own power is inseparable from the Force. It would make him too strong to be allowed to live, and however annoying he is, he’s still useful.

“Don’t touch it--” Ren shouts, too late. Hux’s fist closes around the object and he heaves it at Ren’s head.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t hit him in the face; Ren catches it in a bare hand, which does knock him ungracefully in the face, but which isn’t satisfying. “Hux--Hux, no, you can’t have--I told you not to--”

“Take it out of here! It isn’t mine, and I want nothing to do with it! Clean up after yourself, you uncivilized, spoiled cultist!” He spits the last word like the foulest insult.

“General,” Ren says, horribly calmly, “I cannot take this back. It’s _ours_ now. Surely you feel it too?”

“Of course I don’t,” Hux snaps, contrary out of habit. He does feel it. Something heavy, like a new gravity, or a length of wet cloth, stretches invisibly between himself and Ren. It’s nearly hard to breathe, a ghost of Ren’s Force hands around his throat, though his breath remains clear. The new gravity--he will not call it some kind of bond--locks into place as the two stare at each other.

“What the hell even--what is it?” Hux says. He won’t be the first to say what it looks like, faintly vulgar. Ren would accuse him of having his mind in the gutter, thinking about his precious “ritual object” like that.

Ren actually pinches the bridge of his nose, as if Hux is the thick one getting them into horseshit situations and not grasping simple concepts like not leaving his shit where he oughtn’t. “I told you, Hux. It is a ritual object, a kind of battery for spiritual energy. It collects strong emotions from those near it, which can then be extracted later by a Force sensitive with the proper training. An energy well, if you will. As I learned, after you interrupted me, it can be activated by an outpouring of powerful emotions from two or more people; it requires multiple people, I don’t know why. It anchors people together when they touch it, and I… suspect it won’t let us go until we meet the criteria.”

“What kind of rituals,” Hux says slowly, filling with dread, “does that thing need? Do I have to--bleed on it, or something foul like that?” Please, let him not have to do what he thinks.

Ren doesn’t answer. He doesn’t look at Hux. He turns the oblong thing over in his hands, runs a finger over a carving near a rounded tip. “My research,” he says finally, looking firmly at the wall a yard away from Hux’s face, “suggests that it was involved in fertility rites.”

Hux buries his face in his hands, and waits to fall dead. Because he was born unlucky, he does not die in the next five minutes, and has to look back at Ren. “Fertility rites, of course. How silly of me to not assume that the gigantic ancient magic dildo rock covered in eyes could be anything else.” This is all Ren’s fucking fault; he manipulated Hux into touching the object and then set it up so he would get locked into it too, because--he wants to fuck Hux, maybe? It’s a leap of logic, but people have done strange things to get into his bed: been kind to him, been cruel to him, told lies for him, told lies to him, given him luxuries. Hux is perfectly aware that he tends toward paranoia, but it’s not really paranoia if you live with an unstable wizard who apparently wants to sleep with you.

“This isn’t my fault,” Ren says, possibly reading Hux’s mind, because he has no manners. “I told you not to touch it.”

“And I told you to get it out of my office!”

The gravity connecting them contracts insistently. Hux resists the urge to spit at the stupid ritual artifact.

“What do we have to do. To appease that thing?” Hux asks through his grinding teeth. Medical will not be happy if he ends up with misaligned teeth from stress again.

“As I said, it requires an outpouring of strong emotion--”

“I am feeling _pretty fucking strongly right now, Ren.”_

“You’re always feeling strongly,” Ren dismisses him. “I appreciate that about you. It needs something outside of your usual range of emotions, I would suggest something other than greed or vexation.”

“What if we ignore it? Don’t do whatever it ostensibly requires?” Even the thought makes the air feel thin, the weird harmony between him and Ren congealing like leftover cooking fat.

“I imagine it would keep us locked together until we met its requirements, though I don’t know what that would mean for us. Look, Hux, it requires--”

“Yes, yes, an _outpouring_ of emotion, whatever that means. You’re very specific about that word.”

“For many beings, positive… emotions and sensations are traditionally considered to carry more weight than negative ones,” Ren says carefully, in his annoyingly reasonable way employed exclusively for discussing spirituality things about which Hux doesn’t understand or care.

“Such as the deep tranquility of being left alone to my own business?” Don’t make Ren say it. Hux will hit him if he says it.

“In a more… immediate sense, Hux. More intimate, perhaps. Most of the sentient population find even simply the sensory aspect to be very marked.” Hux really does not want to know how Ren picked up that particular piece of information with such confidence. Ren doesn’t want to say it either; small mercies, rare as they are, do still exist. He’s gazing back at the object, as if reading the eyes chiseled into the surface.

“Most of the sentient population,” Hux repeats. “I know that, Ren, I’m not the delicate virgin you may believe me to be.”

“Do you fall into that minor subset of the population?”

“No, Ren, and it wouldn’t matter if I did. I dislike you on an individual, personal level, because of everything about you, regardless of my inclination towards others. I would rather die than fuck you,” Hux says.

“You may get your chance, General,” Ren snarls suddenly. “If we do not provide this object with the energy it requires, it will strip it from us whether we like it or not.”

“It would--kill us?” This cannot be real. It must be a remarkably vivid fever dream. Hux must have fallen ill, so ill he does not even recall it, and his suffering brain and body have presented him with this absolute nightmare as a metaphor for his illness. This is a horrible, extended hallucination brought on by powerful medications, it is the only explanation.

“Fuck or die,” Ren agrees.

“I’ll die, thanks.”

Ren’s wide brow furrows, as if listening to something he doesn’t quite understand. “It doesn’t have to be involved,” he says, hefting the damned fertility rock.

“Well that’s good at least, nobody has to get fucked with the _ritual object._ Even if it did, I still wouldn’t sleep with you.” He had been afraid, at first, that this would not be the case, and that the monstrous thing would have to go in some kind of bodily cavity. He had not relished the prospect.

“It just has to be nearby.”

“Oh, your magic rock is a voyeur now?”

“It doesn’t have consciousness the way you and I do, General.” Ren runs his unoccupied hand through his hair, pacing the room like a caged beast.

While Ren’s back is turned, Hux slips a hand inside his greatcoat, flicks the safety on his blaster off. He’s fully ready to shoot Ren if he feels it necessary; it wouldn’t be the first time he’s been ready to shoot him. He’s ready most of the time, if he’s honest.

“It wouldn’t count if I forced you,” Ren says sharply, as if he knows Hux is palming his sidearm. “It wouldn’t--meet the criteria.”

“Isn’t that a relief.” It is.

Hux, master strategist, does not have a plan. Remarkably few of his plans involve inadvertently starting occult rituals with his resident sorcerer; in recent years, since the integration of Kylo Ren into the finer workings of the Order, he’s tried to built gussets into his plans, places with room to move in the event that Ren happens and derails everything. Clever as he may be, even Hux cannot prepare for each Kylo Ren eventuality.

It’s easy enough to say he hates Ren so much he’d rather die, but it would leave the Order without either of its most effective commanders. Is he willing to stake the entire Order on Ren’s vague understanding of his own religion? Had Hux not been raised to regard the interests of the First Order above his own, the answer would be clear to him; as it stands, with Ren pacing around the room, eyes never moving from Hux, he can barely breathe, let alone think properly. He needs to be somewhere else, or Ren needs to stop being here.

Ren’s heavy treads stop as Hux marches for the door. He can feel that black stare breaking against his back. “Where do you think you’re going, General?”

“Elsewhere. I can hardly think with you and that thing staring at me.” He will not admit that he has no idea where to go. He considers going to pitch himself out the airlock, or into a reactor somewhere. It would be less weird than sitting in his office deciding whether he has it in him to fuck Ren. Or rather, specifically does not have it in him. Before Ren can object or respond or do anything else inane, Hux taps the panel for the door. The thick gravity anchoring Ren and him seeps into his blood. Breathing feels wet and raw, as if he’s been sprinting, but without the shortness and panting.

The object is dissatisfied when he moves away from Ren. He feels it buzzing in his teeth. Hux is dissatisfied when he moves closer. His heart skips a beat when he steps over the threshold.

“Hux,” Ren says, voice hemmed with distress. “Hux, don’t.”

Fuck Ren. If he finds this so uncomfortable, he can beg for Hux’s return. He won’t come back till the object really does start to kill him, if it can.

Hux makes it out the the corridor, the gravity weighing him down as if his coat has been lined with lead and then drenched. Sheer bloody-mindedness keeps him on his feet, years of pride and training keep his spine straight. He feels so brittle he fears he might shatter if something caught him at the wrong angle. The door slides shut, the lock clicking, and a wave of longing strikes Hux so sharply that for a moment he thinks he’s walked into some kind of invisible barrier, and nearly starts cursing Ren.

The standard, recycled air of the ship feels too thin, as if Hux should be gasping at the top of a cold mountain. It will be better closer to Ren, he knows with the total certainty of someone having a religious experience. He has to return, then he’ll be able to breathe. If he can get back there, to Ren, to the object, he will be fine.

He does not go to Ren. He goes to the bridge, vision warping, knees shaking, feeling weak in ways he hasn’t since he ran until he threw up under Academy training. He does not throw up, despite reminding himself of the nearest public refresher. None of the crew remark on it, but when Hux catches his reflection in a viewport, he’s shocked by how pale and sick he looks even to himself. Having carried out his full bridge shift, he fully intends to go to the medbay and sleep on a cot there if he must. He can’t go back to his room, because Ren and his rock might still be there and Hux does not want to find out. The extra gravity almost anchors his feet to the floor.

Hux does not go to the medbay, though he means to. He becomes aware of having walked back to his rooms, now standing before his own door and afraid to knock, as if in a fever dream. He can’t wake up.

He watches his hand rise, watches it enter the unlock code. He does not mean step back over the threshold. He does not mean to drape his coat over the back of his sofa.

How long has Kylo Ren been standing there holding the ritual artifact? Has he been there all day? Hux should have put him out the airlock. He should have left him to staunch his own wounds with snow on Starkiller, left him there to try to push his own guts back into his abdominal cavity. There should be plenty of room, heartless as Ren is.

Without Hux’s consent or consciousness, the wet gravity has drawn him and Ren so close together that they could touch without either straightening an arm, and Ren pauses. His eyes are wide and dark as ever, faintly lost, and the scar on his face pulls at his skin despite the medical droids’ work. Hux wants to dig his nails into the seam of it, rip into Ren’s awful, lovely face, make him bleed and weep and obey. He wants to crack open Ren’s ribs, see him laid open in the snow again, see how he works inside.

He wants to crush Ren into a useful shape, something other than his constant raw potential for usefulness, turn him into the fine, glorious weapon he could be, wants to break him down into his constituent parts and sort the flawed from the perfect, burn away his impurities until he shines and flows like quicksilver; clean him out like a weapon or a felled animal, well-oiled and shined, gutted and dressed. He wants to put Ren in some manner of order. He does not want to touch for the sake of it or some paltry, fleeting physical sensation, but only to guide and improve. He wants many things in many ways, all of which he cannot have.

If he did not abjure the chaos of Kylo Ren, Hux could see the way to victory, a complete, peaceful rule without the bother of Resistance factions and obscure religious debates. Were he able to point Ren like an arrow, he could stand him and see the use in him. If they could work together they could approach like some great insect’s claw from both sides and destroy on both fronts. He does not want to be rid of Kylo Ren; rather, he wants to be rid of the imperfections of him.

Unfortunately, it is the flaws that make Ren a whole; to remove them would be to make him less than himself and thereby less useful. Hux cannot have what he wants: a useful leader who could truly lead and inspire with him. And so Hux hates him from the core of his soul, if he has one.

The object hits the floor with a heavier sound than it should; Hux starts, shaking away from his unbroken gaze with Ren. The rock is no longer watching either of them.

“You hate me,” Ren says.

“Yes,” Hux agrees. “Do we still have to fuck?”

“An overwhelming conviction for oneself,” Ren whispers. “An intense euphoria or suffering. Passion.” He stares at Hux, still murmuring to himself. “You hate me, Hux. You hate me so much that the Force… accepted that.”

“Are you serious? Nobody has to get naked to placate your magic rock? This is not a very good seduction, Ren.” The ritual object must be more easily controlled than Ren made it sound. Typical, blowing everything out of proportion, making things more dramatic than they need. Hux has many other things to spend time on now, with the Ren situation apparently handled.

Wrapping his hand in his cowl, Ren retrieves the ritual artifact from the floor and cradles it to his chest as if it is something delicate and fine. “I will--remove it.”

“Please do. Good day, Supreme Leader.”

Ren leaves. Hux hates him. Ren hates him back, and plants seeds of Darkness in that hate. He will have his power somehow.


End file.
